Fractal Slope-Based Seismic Wave Detection Method

Automatic P-wave arrival detection is the first task in an earthquake early warning systems. This study proposes a novel detection method for this based on a fractal slope (FS). We improved the calculation method of the fractal dimension to increase the calculation speed and proposed a continuous algorithm. Furthermore, we applied FS in conjunction with the short-term average over the long-term average (STA/LTA), named STA/LTA + FS. We designed orthogonal experiments with different parameters and selected a total of 40,020 sets of seismic waves from the Japanese dataset to test the best parameters. A total of 45,302 sets of seismic waves from the STanford EArthquake dataset and the Chinese dataset were selected to test the generality of the proposed method. The results show that the mean error in detection time of the proposed method is +0.042 s for different datasets. In addition, STA/LTA + FS is robust over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio, epicentral distance, and magnitude, with the percentage of timing errors below 0.5 s higher than 95%.